Message Boards

Topic : 05/15 Psychic Dramas

Number of Replies: 284

New Messages This Week: 0

Last Reply On:

Created on : Friday, May 09, 2008, 03:58:33 pm

Author : DrPhilBoard1

Some people get spooked by horror films and others by Ouija boards, but are there really ghosts among us? James Van Praagh, a world-renowned medium and co-executive producer of the CBS drama Ghost Whisperer, believes the spirit world is closer than we think. James goes ghost-busting on the Paramount Studios lot with The Insider correspondent, Victoria Recaño. Their discoveries might surprise you. Then, Jennifer Love Hewitt, actress and star of Ghost Whisperer, discusses the unexplained occurrences she encountered on the set. Jennifer plays a medium on the show, but is she a believer in real life? Plus, Diane claims to be haunted by the spirit of a 10-year-old boy. She calls the presence “Jerry” and says he even zaps her hands, arms and legs when he’s angry! Dr. Phil arranges a meeting between James and Diane to see if the medium can communicate with the wayward wraith. You won't believe what James uncovers! Then, Mercedes says she's been addicted to psychics for 12 years and has spent nearly $4,000 a year seeking their advice. She even consulted with six soothsayers to see if she should appear on the Dr. Phil show! Mercedes’ son, Glenn, says he doesn’t need a crystal ball to see that the psychics are taking his mother straight to the cleaners. What does the future hold for Mercedes if she continues down this path? And, James performs readings for a few audience members. Don't miss his startling revelations that bring several people to tears.

As of January, 2009, this message board will become "Read Only" and will be closed to further posting. Please join the NEW Dr. Phil Community to continue your discussions, personalize your message board experience, start a blog and meet new friends.

05/15 Psychic Dramas

If I saw something for which there was not a current
scientific or medical explanation for, then I would have confidence in
2 things:

1) that there probably is an explanation, I just may not be aware of it. Then I
would do the appropriate research to find said explanation.

2) If there were no current explanation I would still have confidence that it
could be explained through science, however, the proper research may not have
yet been done to explain it.

Eyes and ears are tricky things, in that the brain is a tricky thing.
There are many conditions that can cause one to think that they have seen or
experienced the 'unexplainable' or the 'supernatural' and the root of these
experiences is in the brain and the imagination, in wishful thinking, in
neurological misfiring of the brain, and simple explainable, perfectly natural phenomena
they one may not understand.

As to your question of what I would do if I actually saw a spiritual entity, I
direct you to what I outlined above in 1 & 2. I would understand, with
complete confidence, that I needed to get myself to a medical professional
because I was having either a hallucination and may need care, or perhaps I
could be having a reaction to a medication or I might have an as of yet
undiagnosed infection (which can cause hallucinations).

psychic dramas LOGIC

If I saw something for which there was not a current
scientific or medical explanation for, then I would have confidence in
2 things:

1) that there probably is an explanation, I just may not be aware of it. Then I
would do the appropriate research to find said explanation.

2) If there were no current explanation I would still have confidence that it
could be explained through science, however, the proper research may not have
yet been done to explain it.

Eyes and ears are tricky things, in that the brain is a tricky thing.
There are many conditions that can cause one to think that they have seen or
experienced the 'unexplainable' or the 'supernatural' and the root of these
experiences is in the brain and the imagination, in wishful thinking, in
neurological misfiring of the brain, and simple explainable, perfectly natural phenomena
they one may not understand.

As to your question of what I would do if I actually saw a spiritual entity, I
direct you to what I outlined above in 1 & 2. I would understand, with
complete confidence, that I needed to get myself to a medical professional
because I was having either a hallucination and may need care, or perhaps I
could be having a reaction to a medication or I might have an as of yet
undiagnosed infection (which can cause hallucinations).

Now that is being to logical and in denial.

What would be your explanation for a large wine glass being taken out of a china cabinet, and placed on the brick floor in front of the fire place, across the room from the cabinet. Or your Christmas tree being thrown down to the floor with all the garland heading across the room to the front door?

Or shaving cream drawings on the bathroom mirror? This had all been done while my husband and I were not home. No one had a key, no one broke in, and yes we had a spiritual entity for nine years in this home.

reply

Thank you for sharing, I admire you for a hard job, that certainly must be very emotional.

The psychic's I am speaking of on TV do not charge for their services. They help out of a need to use their gifts to help others.

I wish I could remember what program they are on, I believe it is one of the COLD CASES, or one of the detective shows. The police are skeptics and do voice their opinions on the subject. Until the psychic helps them find the killer, or the missing person. They then admit that they would not have been able to solve the crime without their help.

I do not feel James Van Prag. (sp) was a good example of the Psychic world, in fact he has slipped a lot from when he first came to attention.

I do not care for Sylvia Brown either, she is only in it for the money.

The most altruistic one is John Edward, he is kind, loving and very good at his gift.

If you ever get a chance to see him, do watch.

I will keep an ear open for him on t.v. as a rule, I don't watch the psychic clips anymore, you can't tell what's authentic or not...esp. on t.v. But, I will watch if it comes on.

~

For other's reading this:

~

To be honest, when I had a few experiences such as I mentioned in the other post, I watched the claims of the "very" cases, that were mine. And each and every time, what was on TV...was not true. Not one station, or show ever....ever, I followed up on those cases to see what "really" happened. They would say.. Van Praag was on the Hornbeck case, and that's it. Leaving the listener to autopilot into ...thinking he had a hit, or was successful. I won't go as far as say this was intentional, after all I do not know the heart of the producer, but it's suspect to me. After that case, I made it point to watch others, and then follow back to see if the claim was hit or miss....sure enough they had been wrong. Knowing what goes on...outside of your living room television set...sure can make a difference. Now, when a show comes on with claims, I am hip to how it's done. Having experienced it in real life, left me extremely wary... I have not heard of one authentic find. To me it's entertainment at best, unless of course it involves a crime...then it's serious business to me, as it involves...real people.

~

If you would like to hear about an account of a mother who carries a torch for this kind of harm, she tells of her own experience with psychics. Her name is Kelly Jolkowski, and she maintains a site called "voice for the missing" in memory for her lost son Jason. www.projectjason.org These families can use all the support we can muster, beside the psychic information (which is located down a bit on the home page).

~

I am not slashing psychics, I am only asking those who are interested to educate themselves, if your a Christian...I am willing to compare notes with you. You can find my site on my profile. Which is not about religion, but mostly psychology, phobia's, abuse, emotional and physical and various other topics.

I don't want to argue with anyone, that does not serve any purpose. I have friends from just about every faith. The only thing that concerns me personally, is when one thinks Jesus condones. He doesn't...and I will show you where in the bible..he instructs. I would be a lousy Christian if I didn't. I would be even a lousier human if I didn't use a horn to tell you of these families...that get duped.

05/15 Psychic Dramas

What would be your explanation for a large wine glass being taken out of a china cabinet, and placed on the brick floor in front of the fire place, across the room from the cabinet. Or your Christmas tree being thrown down to the floor with all the garland heading across the room to the front door?

Or shaving cream drawings on the bathroom mirror? This had all been done while my husband and I were not home. No one had a key, no one broke in, and yes we had a spiritual entity for nine years in this home.

Picalina

What exactly am I in denial about? Do you not find it
odd that even though so many people claim to have had supernatural experiences
that not one single human being has ever been able to replicate that experience
in a double blind scientific study in a laboratory? I find it to be very
telling.

Denial would infer that I had experienced something that I did not want to believe was true. Quite the contrary, if I were presented with scientific proof that such things occur then I would believe that they do based on rational thought processes. No such evidence has ever been presented to the scientific community at large, so there is simply nothing to be in denial about.

As for your experiences, you are using the argument from personal experience
as your justification that what you are relating is true. As I have
already covered in a previous response to you, there are many, many reasons
that people believe they are experiencing either psychic or supernatural phenomenon,
when actually they are not.

For example, someone in your house may have placed the wine glass where it was
placed, which is the most likely explanation. You could have done it
yourself in a fugue state and have no memory of it. If you say that you
actually saw it happen I would have only to suppose, and not to be unkind, but
I seriously would believe that you had fabricated the incident entirely.

Christmas trees fall, people knock them over, pets knock them over, hard
breezes or drafts could knock one over or it could have just been that it was
never very stable in its stand to begin with.

Shaving crème drawing on a bathroom mirror was done by a human in your house.

What you are doing is something called 'the worship of gaps'. It occurs
when one can not find an immediate explanation for an event and instead fills
in a supernatural explanation.

By chance did you call any local news crews to come film in your home in order to catch these things on film? Did you offer your home open to scientific inquiry in order to rule out any natural phenomena and trickery or did you simply accept the 'explanation' that these events were cause by something supernatural?

It's easy to take the most simple, available explanation, especially if it somethng that the individual wants to believe is true anyway. It is harder to be skeptical and scientific and probe for answers which concur with the laws of physics and science.

05/15 Psychic Dramas

psychic dramas LOGIC

What exactly am I in denial about? Do you not find it
odd that even though so many people claim to have had supernatural experiences
that not one single human being has ever been able to replicate that experience
in a double blind scientific study in a laboratory? I find it to be very
telling.

Denial would infer that I had experienced something that I did not want to believe was true. Quite the contrary, if I were presented with scientific proof that such things occur then I would believe that they do based on rational thought processes. No such evidence has ever been presented to the scientific community at large, so there is simply nothing to be in denial about.

As for your experiences, you are using the argument from personal experience
as your justification that what you are relating is true. As I have
already covered in a previous response to you, there are many, many reasons
that people believe they are experiencing either psychic or supernatural phenomenon,
when actually they are not.

For example, someone in your house may have placed the wine glass where it was
placed, which is the most likely explanation. You could have done it
yourself in a fugue state and have no memory of it. If you say that you
actually saw it happen I would have only to suppose, and not to be unkind, but
I seriously would believe that you had fabricated the incident entirely.

Christmas trees fall, people knock them over, pets knock them over, hard
breezes or drafts could knock one over or it could have just been that it was
never very stable in its stand to begin with.

Shaving crème drawing on a bathroom mirror was done by a human in your house.

What you are doing is something called 'the worship of gaps'. It occurs
when one can not find an immediate explanation for an event and instead fills
in a supernatural explanation.

By chance did you call any local news crews to come film in your home in order to catch these things on film? Did you offer your home open to scientific inquiry in order to rule out any natural phenomena and trickery or did you simply accept the 'explanation' that these events were cause by something supernatural?

It's easy to take the most simple, available explanation, especially if it somethng that the individual wants to believe is true anyway. It is harder to be skeptical and scientific and probe for answers which concur with the laws of physics and science.

Logic, I already explained husband and I were at work, no one else lived in the house, no one came in.

I do have documented photo's of these occurrences. There are many many more things that happened

too many to list here. I know for a fact that it was an entity. You can rationalize all you want but it did happen.

But yet...

Logic, I already explained husband and I were at work, no one else lived in the house, no one came in.

I do have documented photo's of these occurrences. There are many many more things that happened

too many to list here. I know for a fact that it was an entity. You can rationalize all you want but it did happen.

Picalina

You probably most certainly do have photos of the aftermath of something that
happened. Photos taken after the fact, however, prove nothing. I could
knock over the vase on my kitchen counter and take a photo and say a spirit did
it and still have no proof other than my claim. Yet, you claim to earnestly
believe that something that could only have happened in a supernatural way
if it violated several laws of physics occurred in your home and you have
contacted no one from the scientific community or the media to investigate
further. Amazing, because if it were proven to be true then you could be
the first human being in recorded history to have your claims verified.

How do you know for a 'fact' that it was an entity? A fact is something
that can be independently verified and does not involve opinion. Your
opinion is that it was an entity.

Why are there too many to list? You certainly wanted to talk about
psychic phenomena before you engaged me in conversation, but suddenly there are
too many to list?

What I am doing is not 'rationalizing', by the way. Rationalizing is when
you are trying to make something fit into your belief system because you shut out the possibility of other causes other than what you already accept. That is what you are doing. What I am doing is using logic and
reason, hence the name, to rationally think through things instead of accepting
'explanations' that truly explain nothing. I will gladly take my
scientific, rational mind any day over the mind of one who readily believes the
unproven and refuses to challenge their thinking.

psychic dramas LOGIC

You probably most certainly do have photos of the aftermath of something that
happened. Photos taken after the fact, however, prove nothing. I could
knock over the vase on my kitchen counter and take a photo and say a spirit did
it and still have no proof other than my claim. Yet, you claim to earnestly
believe that something that could only have happened in a supernatural way
if it violated several laws of physics occurred in your home and you have
contacted no one from the scientific community or the media to investigate
further. Amazing, because if it were proven to be true then you could be
the first human being in recorded history to have your claims verified.

How do you know for a 'fact' that it was an entity? A fact is something
that can be independently verified and does not involve opinion. Your
opinion is that it was an entity.

Why are there too many to list? You certainly wanted to talk about
psychic phenomena before you engaged me in conversation, but suddenly there are
too many to list?

What I am doing is not 'rationalizing', by the way. Rationalizing is when
you are trying to make something fit into your belief system because you shut out the possibility of other causes other than what you already accept. That is what you are doing. What I am doing is using logic and
reason, hence the name, to rationally think through things instead of accepting
'explanations' that truly explain nothing. I will gladly take my
scientific, rational mind any day over the mind of one who readily believes the
unproven and refuses to challenge their thinking.

Your thinking is unbelievable! Are you by chance playing devil's advocate?

I can see there is no reaching you. I do hope you have an experience soon, and it will be an astonishing awaking for you I predict.

I have nothing further to say on this matter with you. You are very frustrating.

You asked for idea's..Here's mine.

Your thinking is unbelievable! Are you by chance playing devil's advocate?

I can see there is no reaching you. I do hope you have an experience soon, and it will be an astonishing awaking for you I predict.

I have nothing further to say on this matter with you. You are very frustrating.

I didn't want to interrupt the discussion that was going on, so I waited until it's conclusion. If you don't mind I would like to offer some idea's.

You didn't say if this happened all in one night, or over time.. I am guessing as I re read your post that different things happen over time, as you mentioned I think 9 years worth of oddities.

I do not mean to discount your claim, but offering to look at this logically.

You say it was just you and your husband. Do either of you have an angry ex? Do you have children? How is your relationship with neighbors? Do you have pets? Do you have a doggy door? Do you live near open spaces where a raccoon could have came in. Who else has a key to your house? I would think setting up a camera might yield evidence as to who is behind it. It very well could be a series of occurrences by different factors. The last poster was right on to suggest these to you...unless of course your getting a kick out of entertaining the thought of an entity.

05/15 Psychic Dramas

Your thinking is unbelievable! Are you by chance playing devil's advocate?

I can see there is no reaching you. I do hope you have an experience soon, and it will be an astonishing awaking for you I predict.

I have nothing further to say on this matter with you. You are very frustrating.

Actually, my thinking is very believable because in order to
believe something with an exaggerated claim (such as the ones made by those
that believe in the supernatural) I first have to have proof. For me
proof= belief. You, however, have no proof and yet you believe. That
actually makes your beliefs the ones that are ‘unbelievable’!!

There is no reaching me?? Without verifiable proof, no there isn't.
Let's say, for example that I went around believing everyone that told me that
they had a tiny purple elephant in their left pocket, yet no one could produce
proof. That wouldn't be very smart would it? Yet if someone could
pull out a tiny purple elephant from their left pocket, I could be 'reached' because
they would have provided me with verifiable proof.

I am frustrating? Wow, that's a reach! You and others that believe
in supernatural phenomena make claims that are 100 % unproven and unverifiable
and cling to these beliefs in the face of complete scientific certainty that these
things can not possibly be true and I'm frustrating?? Ha, ha!!
Uhhh...yeah.

As far as you hoping I have an experience very soon, I have experiences every
single day. Real, verifiable experiences that can be replicated and
proven. They are not supernatural experiences, however, because the
supernatural is simple fallacy.

As a side note on several occasions as a kid I 'heard' my name called in my
home when I was the only one around. Even as a kid I wasn’t gullible
enough to think it was a ghost or spirit!! Through medical and scientific
research in college I learned about how the brain can misfire and produce spontaneous
memories that seem so real that they are or could nearly be called an auditory
hallucination. And there you have it. I was so used to having my
name called by my mother on a consistent basis that my brain simply reproduced
that memory for some reason. It doesn't mean that anything was wrong with
me, it just sometimes happens. Had I been gullible I would have filled in
that gap of not having an explanation for the phenomena with saying it was a
ghost, a spirit, an angel, a god..ect. Instead, I reserved judgment and
was discerning, even though I had no immediate explanation and with research
and education I finally found the answer, or at least something that makes
sense considering that the human brain has been probed with electrical currents
that have replicated similar experiences under laboratory conditions.

Amazing how far a little discernment and research can take you isn't it?

If you do not want to engage me in conversation again then simply don't.
It says a lot, however, that you are so completely unwilling to have your
beliefs even slightly challenged by a total stranger that you decide that
person is 'frustrating' and not worth your time. Perhaps what is
frustrating to you is that I am not one of the people that will sit here and
nod in quiet agreement at the utter nonsense of believing the completely
unproven.